Re: copyright status of text and code snippets on lua-users.org

[Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra@...>]

On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 3:26 PM, startx <startx@plentyfact.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Sep 2011 15:10:22 +0200
> Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 2:52 PM, Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@gmx.net>
>> wrote:
>> > IIRC, this topic has been raised not so long ago.
>> > Personally, I would consider any code snippet released in the wild
>> > (Wiki, forum, mailing list, etc.) without explicit license
>> > attached[1] to fall on the public domain (again, this has been
>> > argued about recently, notably about if PD means anything), ie. can
>> > be used freely.
>
> i doubt that you can even put merely trivial examples under some
> license. afaik most jurisdictions demand that the work which is
> copyrighted is "original work", not the 100th version of what has been
> done a million times before.
>
> you can try to put code like
>
> function helloworld()
>   io.write("hello world copyrighted")
> end
>
> under a license but that would hold nowhere.
>
> startx
>
>

When you say hello world would never hold as copyrighted anywhere, you
are absolutely right. The code contained on Lua-users.org can be more
elaborate than that though. I think some of the snippets on for
example http://lua-users.org/wiki/FunctionalTuples certainly are
eligible as copyrightable material.